Abstract
Parkinson's disease (PD) is second most prevalent neurodegenerative disorder following Alzheimer's disease. Parkinson's disease is hypothesized to be caused by a multifaceted interplay between genetic and environmental factors. Herein, and for the first time, we describe the integration of metabolomics and epigenetics (genome-wide DNA methylation; epimetabolomics) to profile the frontal lobe from people who died from PD and compared them with age-, and sex-matched controls. We identified 48 metabolites to be at significantly different concentrations (FDR q < 0.05), 4,313 differentially methylated sites [5'-C-phosphate-G-3' (CpGs)] (FDR q < 0.05) and increased DNA methylation age in the primary motor cortex of people who died from PD. We identified Primary bile acid biosynthesis as the major biochemical pathway to be perturbed in the frontal lobe of PD sufferers, and the metabolite taurine (p-value = 5.91E-06) as being positively correlated with CpG cg14286187 (SLC25A27; CYP39A1) (FDR q = 0.002), highlighting previously unreported biochemical changes associated with PD pathogenesis. In this novel multi-omics study, we identify regulatory mechanisms which we believe warrant future translational investigation and central biomarkers of PD which require further validation in more accessible biomatrices.